November 28, 2013– TURKEY– The Sea of Marmara was shaken by two moderate earthquakes on Wednesday morning. According to a statement made by the Prime Ministry’s Disaster and Emergency Management Directorate (AFAD), an earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 4.7struck Marmara Ereglisi, near the city of Tekirdag at 6:21 a.m. and the same region was soon after hit by another quake with a magnitude of 4.1. The statement added that earthquakes are observed 24/7 in the region and that the epicenter of Wednesday morning’s quake was 20 kilometers off of Marmara’s Ereğlisi coast. There have not been any casualties reported in the quakes. “In 1999, a 7.4 magnitude earthquake along the North Anatolian fault killed some 30,000 people in western Turkey. There is some evidence that another segment closer to the densely populated city of Istanbul could be next to rupture, which could create worse devastation. In 2010, a team of Turkish, American and French scientists were on a Turkish research ship in the Sea of Marmara to image the faults and its overlying sediments to better assess the risk. The historic pattern suggests that the next quake should strike just south of Istanbul, beneath the Sea of Marmara. Here, the North Anatolian fault splinters into multiple fault strands, which created the depression that houses the present-day sea.” –World Bulletin, Columbia University Blog

1 Response to Two moderate earthquakes strike along dangerous fault under Sea of Marmara

(CNN) — A 5.6 magnitude earthquake shook southern Iran Thursday evening, centered about 39 miles northeast of the Persian Gulf city of Bandar Bushehr, the U.S. Geological Survey said Thursday.
The quake, at a depth of 10 miles, struck at 5:21 p.m. local time. There were no immediate reports of damage.
The city is in Bushehr province, which is the site of a nuclear power plant that went online in 2011.
The damage that earthquakes with magnitudes of 5.0 to 5.9 can produce varies. Near the epicenter, quakes on the middle to upper part of that range could leave negligible damage in buildings of good design and construction, but considerable damage in poorly built or badly designed buildings, the USGS says.